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11 Apps to Find Specialty Coffee, Great Wine, and Top Restaurants
La Cotorra shares apps and services for finding specialty coffee shops, good wines, and niche restaurants — they will definitely help you discover great spots both in everyday life and while travelling.
European Coffee Trip
This app serves as a guide to speciality coffee shops around the world. It has a very simple interface that is easy and pleasant to use: you select a location, and cafés appear on the screen, from the closest to the farthest.
Users themselves can recommend a café for inclusion in the European Coffee Trip. Moderators then decide whether to approve it: after receiving a submission, they send visitors to the venue to check quality. If those visitors are satisfied, the place is added to the app. It is not possible to buy a spot in the European Coffee Trip.
The platform is funded through user donations.
Vivino
This is a service for selecting wines and food pairings. You can scan a label with your phone camera and get an average rating from experts and users worldwide, along with comments on taste, acidity, body, and flavour notes.
The platform has been operating since 2010, and over 16 years, it has accumulated a database of 20 million wines and 3.2 billion scanned labels. The app recognises both common bottles from Lidl and Mercadona, as well as products from small craft wine shops somewhere in southern Sicily.
Untappd
Untappd works on the same principle as Vivino, but for beer. It helps you discover nearby craft venues, themed events, and opinions from experts and local communities. It also allows you to keep a personal beer journal, tracking what you tried, when, how much, and whether you liked it.
Fooducate
An essential app for those who actively monitor their diet and the quality of products they consume. Its main function is to evaluate product ingredients, many of which are unclear to most consumers. Fooducate aims to solve this problem by rating each product’s composition on a scale from A to D.
The app was originally developed for the U.S. market, where products with potentially harmful additives are more common than in the EU. Today, it operates worldwide on both iOS and Android.
Delectable
Another wine app, but unlike Vivino, most of the categorisation here is done by experts and sommeliers rather than users. The bottle scanning feature works the same way as in competing apps.
On the platform, you can read reviews of rare collectable wines, find out what’s best to choose from mass-market options, and learn which wines pair best with goat or cow cheese. You can filter by grape variety or region (including Spain). The full size of Delectable’s database is unclear.
The app also includes beer, beer-based drinks, and mezcal. Its App Store rating is 4.9.
Happy Cow
This app greatly simplifies life for vegans, vegetarians, and pescatarians: it shows venues and shops offering suitable products. Its App Store rating is impressive: 4.9 with more than 400 reviews. One downside is that the app is paid, with pricing varying by region. There is no free trial.
Cocktail Flow
First, La Cotorra has already put together a guide to the best cocktail bars in Valencia. Second, Cocktail Flow is an app that can significantly expand your drink options without constantly buying new ingredients.
It works as a recipe aggregator: you upload all the ingredients you have — including alcohol, mixers, proteins, or juices — and Cocktail Flow suggests possible drinks.
There are many similar apps that work in the same way: you can find them by searching for Mixologist or Cocktail Recipes and choose the one you like most.
Gate Guru
This is an aggregator of venues in airports around the world. While high prices are expected, food quality is not always great — and that’s where Gate Guru comes in.
Venues are collected and sorted by rating, which is especially useful in large airports. You can scan your boarding pass, and the app will suggest suitable options near your gate.
Pomogaika Wine Sommelier
This app helps you choose wine in chains like Mercadona, DIA, Consum, and Masymas (currently limited to these retailers in Spain, but plans to expand).
It appeared in the App Store just a few days ago and is currently listed as iPhone-only, although it is already available on Google Play as well. The interface is user-friendly, and one of its advantages over larger competitors like Vivino is language selection, including Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian.
Otherwise, it works similarly to competitors: you scan a bottle from a supported store, and the app provides a rating and product details.
The Fork
An app for finding and booking nearby restaurants. It is similar to Google Maps and TripAdvisor but has its own advantages: for example, booking through The Fork often gives access to discounts on set menus or specific dishes, promotions, and up to 50% off meals.
Restaurants are categorised and rated on a 10-point scale. There is both a web version and apps for iOS and Android.
Too Good To Go
This popular app features venues in hundreds of cities where you can get food at significant discounts at certain times.
It was originally designed as a sustainable solution for unsold baked goods: bakeries offered leftover items at very low prices at the end of the day. Now, the app includes cafés, bakeries, restaurants, and even shops. Discounts apply to products nearing their sell-by date or freshly baked goods that won’t be sold the next day.
Most often, customers don’t know what exactly will be in the box or bag. Expired or spoiled food is not distributed (and if it happens, it affects the venue’s rating). The most attractive offers are usually booked early in the day.